Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism

The public prominence of religion has increased globally in recent years, while places associated with religion, such as pilgrimage centers, and famous cathedrals, temples and shrines, have attracted growing numbers of visitors and media attention. Such developments are part of a global process where different forms of travel – physical movement such as labor and lifestyle migration, tourism of various forms, the cultural heritage industry and pilgrimage – have become a major feature of the modern world. These translocal and transnational processes involve flows of not just people but also material objects, ideas, information, images and capital.

The public prominence of religion aligned to the modern growth of tourism (sometimes now claimed as the world’s single largest industry) has created a new dynamic relationship between religion, travel and tourism. It has been mirrored by expanding academic research in these areas over the last twenty years across a variety of disciplinary areas, ranging from anthropology, sociology, geography, history and religious studies to newly emergent areas such as tourism and migration studies. Such studies have also expanded exponentially in terms of the geographic spread of places, religions and regions being researched.

This series provides a new forum for studies based around these themes, drawing together research on the relationships between religion, travel and tourism. These include studies from global and cross-cultural perspectives of topics, such as:

commoditization and consumerism;

media representations of religion, travel and tourism;

heritage, tourism and the cultural politics of religious representation;

gender, sexuality and religious movements;

religion and travel writing;

ideological and violent struggles over religion and resistance to tourist intrusion;

Commemorating the Dead

Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism is the first volume to bring together a detailed analysis of professional military pilgrimage with other forms of commemorating military conflict. The volume looks beyond the discussion of battlefield tourism undertaken primarily by civilians which has…

In spite of Islam’s long history in Europe and the growing number of Muslims resident in Europe, little research exists on Muslim pilgrimage in Europe. This collection of eleven chapters is the first systematic attempt to fill this lacuna in an emerging research field.
Placing the pilgrims’…

Religion and Nature in the United States

National Parks – ‘America’s Best Idea’ – were from the first seen as sacred sites embodying the God-given specialness of American people and American land, and from the first they were also marked as tourist attractions. The inherent tensions between these two realities ensured the parks would be…

Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Global Views

The Spanish Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage rooted in the Medieval period and increasingly active today, has attracted a growing amount of both scholarly and popular attention. With its multiple points of departure in Spain and other European countries, its simultaneously secular and religious…

Archaeological Approaches to Sacred Travel and Movement in the Ancient World

This volume sheds new light on the significance and meaning of material culture for the study of pilgrimage in the ancient world, focusing in particular on Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity. It thus discusses how archaeological evidence can be used to advance our…

Global Perspectives

Although there has been a massive increase in the volume of pilgrimage research and publications, traditional Anglophone scholarship has been dominated by research in Western Europe and North America. In their previous edited volume, International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies (Routledge, 2015…

Explorations Through Java

Exploring the distinctive nature and role of local pilgrimage traditions among Muslims and Catholics, Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices draws particularly on south central Java, Indonesia. In this area, the hybrid local Muslim pilgrimage culture is shaped by traditional Islam, the…

Crossing the Borders

Since the beginning of the anthropology of pilgrimage, scant attention has been paid to pilgrimage and pilgrim places in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. Seeking to address such a deficit, this book brings together scholars from central, eastern and south-eastern Europe to explore the…

An Ethnography of Tourism and Pilgrimage in the Himalayas

Mobile Lifeworlds illustrates how the imaginaries and ideals of Western travellers, especially those of untouched nature and spiritual enlightenment, are consistent with media representations of the Himalayan region, romanticism and modernity at large. Blending tourism and pilgrimage, travel across…

The practice of walking to a sacred space for personal and spiritual transformation has long held a place in the British imagination. Art and the Sacred Journey in Britain examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination from the years 1790 to 1850. Through a close…

Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition

The Seductions of Pilgrimage explores the simultaneously attractive and repellent, beguiling and alluring forms of seduction in pilgrimage. It focuses on the varied discursive, imaginative, and practical mechanisms of seduction that draw individual pilgrims to a pilgrimage site; the objects, places…

The study of pilgrimage often centres itself around miracles and spontaneous populist activities. While some of these activities and stories may play an important role in the emergence of potential pilgrimage sites and in helping create wider interest in them, this book demonstrates that the…

Itineraries, Gaps and Obstacles

Although research on contemporary pilgrimage has expanded considerably since the early 1990s, the conversation has largely been dominated by Anglophone researchers in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and religious studies from the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Northern Europe.…

Journeying to the Sacred

This volume provides a theoretically and empirically-grounded study of the significance of landscape in the experience of Christian pilgrimage across different denominations and its intersection with cultural heritage and tourism. The book focuses on pilgrimages to Meteora (Greece), Subiaco (Italy)…